- his firm does not currently work for RIAA

- the 'bot is not meant to harass sites that publish opinions that its clients may not favor. They are looking at ways to ameliorate the 'bot's 'DoS mode'

- their 'bots crawl either randomly or in an A to Z fashion, not in response to postings

- Cyveillance does not store or distribute materials downloaded from Web sites, except for materials that belong to their clients

I expressed my concerns that the behavior of the technology and their public messages are out of sync. It seems to me that a firm that wanted to be a good net citizen would fix the 'bot, observe robots.txt and otherwise be straightforward and forthcoming, insofar as that is consistent with their mission. Brian made reasonable responses, but said he would leave it to others to decide whether circumventing robots.txt amounts to 'circumventing a protection mechanism' per the DMCA.

Lastly, I asked what would happen if their detection mechanism misfired, and included my content along with some of the creepy stuff they sift through. I was concerned that a bug in their software would land my essays and articles in some sort of 'bad content line-up' that had the potential to sully my good name (such as it is). His response was that, while no one can guarantee that software won't misfire, everything that Cyveillance software flags is checked by humans (unlike RIAA's last batch of Cease-and-Desist orders). Brian was concerned that I had published his email. BTW my email to him was a public response to his public note on the spamcop-help lis. We are now in sync about expectations. I may go drop in on these guys in D.C. later on this year...
Comments 10:19:27 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures